One of the most influential pieces of science fiction drama is
Karel Capek's 1921 play "R.U.R." (Rossum's Universal Robots). The
play invented the word "robot." The plot concerns a factory that
creates androids to do labor for its customers.

The Radio Drama Revival site has for its June 4 podcast a full-
length (about an hour) radio production of "R.U.R." If you are
interested in the history of dramatic science fiction, it is worth
hearing. Find it at

July 6 (Tue): THE ILLUSIONIST (2006) and "Eisenheim the
Illusionist" by Steven Millhauser, film at 5:30PM,
discussion of film and story after film
July 8 (Thu): RICHARD III by William Shakespeare, Middletown (NJ)
Public Library, 1995 film at 5:30PM, discussion of film and
book after film (and, yes, it is science fiction!)
July 22 (Thu): THE PRESTIGE by Christopher Priest, Old Bridge (NJ)
Public Library, 7PM
August 12 (Thu): THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by Douglas
Adams, 2005 film at 5:30PM, discussion of film and book
after film

Many of you may know that Roger Ebert is probably the best
known film critic in the country. What you may not know is
he started out as a big science fiction fan. In his journal he
reminisces about his fandom and includes a nice collection
of cover art from the science fiction magazines he enjoyed.
It is well worth taking a look.

I was watching the original GODZILLA in a whole new light.
Godzilla attacks Tokyo. The Diet was discussing what to do about
this monster. The right wing Tea Ceremony Party stands up and
reiterates the following points.

There is no Godzilla. Period.

Godzilla's appearance is a natural fluctuation of nature. He
was not riled up by nuclear testing or any other action of humans.

The presence of this monster in Tokyo is evidence that Japan's
immigration policy has been entirely too lax.

National taxes must not be used to pay for the military or for
medical care for the casualties, because the attack of Godzilla is
not really a national issue but is essentially just a neighborhood
problem.

Meanwhile the insurance companies are refusing to pay off on claims
coming from Tokyo since the survival into the present of dinosaurs
in the area is obviously a pre-existing condition. [-mrl]

VulCON Spock Days Galaxyfest will be held June 11-13 in Vulcan,
Alberta. We visited Vulcan a couple of years ago, on our trip to
the Canadian Rockies, and at that time I wrote:

Our main event of the day--such as it was--was the town of Vulcan.
We started at Tourism and Trek Office, in a building that looked
like a spaceship (though not a starship). This town had been around
for decades with this name, but in the mid-1990s they were looking
for a way to improve their economy. Someone came up with the idea
of tying in to the whole "Star Trek" phenomenon, and it worked.
(Hey, we went there.) The main Trek features in the town are a
replica of a starship on a pedestal by the highway (with welcome
plaques in Vulcan and Klingon), a mural of the farmland with a
shuttle and a starship in it and another mural of the five "Doctors
of 'Star Trek'". But there are other touches. All the directional
signs feature the "Star Trek" logo shape--and Roswell-shaped
aliens, indicating either that Paramount put its foot down on using
their make-up designs for commercial use, or that the people who
designed them did not know the difference. (I assume that the
murals fall under some sort of "fair use" doctrine, since they are
non-commercial.)

But there are a lot of other "non-official" touches. The bookstore
had a regular named, but also called itself a "Bajoran Bookstore."
The library had a starship with glasses reading a book painted on
the outside wall. There was the Enterprise Family Restaurant. And
so on.

One of my students (actually two students at different times) were
asking just what exactly does the famous equation e=mc^2 really
mean? I tried to put together what I knew about the equation and
explain it in high school student terms. That is not easy to do.
I figured if I could write an explanation out here I could just use
it as a reference. Also there would be enough intelligent readers
to correct my inaccuracies. It is very easy to find explanations
of the famous equation by Googling, the words proof e=mc2. The
problem is that the explanations you get are pretty tough for high
school students to follow. I know they are difficult for me
to follow. So the challenge here is not proving the equation or
finding out how it works, but in trying to explain it simply.

Well, on one level the equation has a sort of materialistic
meaning. Matter is just made up of energy in a very concentrated
form. They are two forms of the same thing. It is sort of like
how ice and water are the same thing, but one has crystallized.
Matter is just a solid form of energy. When one breaks apart an
atom, some of the weight disappears. The whole weighs more than
the sum of he parts. But energy is released. Matter has converted
to energy. It may not be a whole lot of energy, but if you can get
the pieces of matter to hit and split apart more atoms you get a
lot of atoms being broken and a very large amount of energy being
released. If you get a chain reaction like this going, a lot of
energy is released compared to the amount of matter that has to go
away. That is a nuclear reaction.

Now for something not entirely different: suppose that you have a
simple clock. It is two parallel mirrors with a photon bouncing
between them. A photon can move only at the speed of light. So if
the two mirrors are a fixed distance apart then a certain number of
bounces is one second. Now you give an identical clock to a truck
driver and he mounts it on the top of his truck. The truck drives
past you. The photon is not just moving up and down; the truck is
moving it forward. That means to you it looks like it is going up
and down diagonals. That could mean it is just covering more
distance, but it cannot do that. It is a photon and photons travel
at the speed of light (at least in a vacuum). What you will
actually see is that the photon will appear to slow down.
Everything on the truck will appear to be moving a little slower
except for the photon which will have this zig-zag up-and-down
path. But the truck driver does not see time changing for him, he
will see it changing for you and it will seem to him that time
slows down for you.

Now as the truck driver goes by he pulls out a gun and shoots it at
you. You pull out an identical gun and shoot it at him. You each
hit the other. You would think his bullet would hit with less
force because it also has slowed down. But from his point of view
it is your bullet that is slower and will have less impact. You
cannot both be right. In fact, you are both wrong. It will seem
like the bullet is going slower, but it will still have the same
impact. The two bullets will each strike with the same momentum.
Momentum is mass times speed. If the speed decreases something has
to compensate so that the momentum does not. Momentum is speed
times mass. The only thing that can increase is the mass. The
bullet that hits you must have increased mass. His bullet has more
mass than yours from your point of view. Your bullet has more mass
than his from his point of view. Your bullet has more energy; his
has more mass. Each has the same momentum. From this it may be
computed that his greater mass is the energy his is lacking divided
by the speed of light squared. M=E/c^2. That is the real Einstein
equation. The familiar one equation is what you get if you cross-
multiply.

Hopefully that explains it (at least to myself). That is probably
no clearer than other explanations available, but it was worth a
try. [-mrl]

CAPSULE: Two biologists, each with psychological problems,
specializing in DNA splicing become de facto parents to the
partially human creature they create in their laboratory. Vincenzo
Natali directs and co-authors, but the film sadly lacks the fresh
originality of his previous films. The science is more hysteria
than believable. Natali's film about DNA-splitting seems
disappointingly recombinant. Rating: +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10

Vincenzo Natali's chief claim to fame still seems to be his
creative 1997 film CUBE about people in a huge cube filled with
cubic rooms inside and a set of rules for going from one chamber to
the next. At the Toronto International Film Festival I have seen
two other clever films he has created, but they seem to be unknown
to most of the world of film fans. I can see why his NOTHING seems
almost unknown. It is a very clever novelty film that makes some
telling philosophical points but seems mostly aimed at the cult
film circuit. On the other hand Natali made CYPHER. I still
consider this to be the best Philip K. Dick film not really based
on Philip K. Dick. If I wanted to get someone to read Dick, I
would show him CYPHER. Natali really captured the feel of Dick's
technologically advanced paranoia. That said, even with a bigger
budget SPLICE just does not seem to have the inventiveness of his
previous films. I see bits of ALIEN, EMBRYO, and SPECIES in
SPLICE. There is definitely some Cronenberg biological horror
there also. Oh, and did I forget to say FRANKENSTEIN?

This is the sort of Frankenstein story you get with an infusion of
technical jargon about DNA splicing. The creature's origins sound
a whole lot more believable than stealing corpses, but the result
is no less absurd. Clive Nicoli (played by Adrien Brody) and Elsa
Kast (Sarah Polley) are two bio-engineers whose job it is to split
and reconnect DNA strands and see what creatures grow from these
hybrids. The things they get are strange-looking and
unpredictable. They make them in pairs and then name them for
famous couples like Romeo and Juliet. Most recently they have
created living beasties they call Fred and Ginger, but from their
shape could be called Rye and Pumpernickel. Clive and Elsa have
been given one hard and fast rule. They are not allowed to use
human DNA. So on one level what we have is a morality tale because
you know darn will what they are going to do and you know darn well
how happy they will be with the outcome. Their new creature is
Dren. That is "nerd" spelled backwards. Dren seems cute and
vulnerable ... at first.

The film is anxious to get Dren's childhood out of the way to get
to teenager-parent sorts of problems--problems with which the
target audience can most empathize. Rather than flashing forward
in time, we find that Dren matures something like 18 human years in
just a few days. By a freak of DNA she is at first surprisingly
normal after developing so far so fast. Of course, here DNA-
chimera body has all sorts of special body parts taken from
different animals, but she is mostly human. She has special wings
that are too small to convince the viewer she really could fly and
too big to believe they can tuck away undetectably into her body.
She is a rebellious virtual-teenager and her parents do not know
what to do with her. Her special weapons and powers do not help.
Many of the problems Clive and Elsa have with have with Dren are
problems that real-world parents have with their children without
benefit of DNA splicing. While Dren turns into a human, Elsa turns
into her mother. I do not know what the mix of DNA in Dren is but
it is clearly the human that dominates. And when the human does
dominate, it is French actress Delphine Chanéac who does the
dominating.

While the images seem a little dim, Tetsuo Nagata's photography has
some arresting images that trip a slight natural revulsion to some
things biological. The film may be better to look at than think
about. (Nagata's work can also be seen in the current MICMACS.)
Somewhat distracting is Adrien Brody's and Sarah Polley's endless
gallery of T-shirts.

Vincenzo Natali has shown more originality in the past than he is
showing in the present. A Frankenstein film does not have to be
pieced together from other bodies of work. SPLICE gets a
disappointing +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 6/10.

THE WINDUP GIRL is Paolo Bacigalupi's debut novel, a sequel of
sorts to his short stories "The Calorie Man" and "Yellow Card Man".
It is winning all sorts of awards these days, including the Nebula.
If you're involved in the field at all, you know this already.
It's like that, if you haven't read it already, you're planning on
it and will be soon. It seems like everybody's talking about it.
Unless I miss my guess, it's going to win the Hugo this year.

But it won't have my number one vote. But let's worry about that
later.

The setting of the story is 22nd century Thailand. The world is a
mess. Traditional sources of energy have been depleted.
Bioterrorism has run rampant. Gene-modified foodstocks gone
terribly wrong have devastated entire countries. The world's water
levels are rising, and Bangkok is surrounded by walls and levees
that are in place to keep the water out and let the residents
survive, although it is a dirt-poor city. Manually-wound springs
are the top source of energy. Genetically engineered creatures
populate the town, including megadonts (critters that are
essentially genetically engineered elephants) and cheshires, that
are, you guessed it, genetically engineered cats that are the
result of a father's generosity toward his daughter and their
friends on her birthday.

Like I said, the place is a mess.

The key to power is a secret seedbank somewhere in Thailand that
has the last natural specimens of plant life--natural food, not
genetically engineered. Discovering the secret location of that
seedbank is the assignment of one Anderson Lake, a representative
of one of the big agricultural mega-corporations of the world. His
cover is running a factory for those energy springs I mentioned
before. He encounters Emiko.

Ah yes, our windup girl. Emiko is a Japanese-designed,
genetically-modified human-like creature, whose sole purpose in
life is to seek a master and obey him. She had a master back in
Japan, but was summarily dumped into Thailand after her usefulness
had run out. She is illegal in Thailand, and is horrendously
abused and exploited by a pimp named Raleigh, who has essentially
made her a slave and display object in his establishment. Emiko,
of course, wants to escape to a rumored place where only New People
(another name for her kind) live.

The other item(s) to keep track of here are the Trade Ministry and
Environment Ministry. As you might guess, they are at odds with
each other. The Environment Ministry concerns itself with trying
to stay ahead of the genetic mutations that can kill the
population. A lot of these come from outside the country. The
Trade Ministry, of course, is trying to bolster trade with the
outside world, and thus bring in items that could potentially be
dangerous to the population.

There's a good-sized cast of characters, a bunch of political
intrigue, and some secrets to the windup girl that end up taking
the story in a direction that while I wasn't expecting it, I should
have seen it coming. The book is terrifically written in a literary
style that would make your high school English teacher proud.

So, what's the problem?

This book is pretty boring (remember folks, this is my opinion,
which I know that a lot of people out there disagree with). I
couldn't bring myself to care about any of the characters--for the
most part, they're all greedy and corrupt. The setting is bleak,
and the story is depressing. I couldn't bring myself to care about
it.

Okay, back to that earlier thought about not voting it number one.
Remember how I said your high school English teacher would be proud
of it? That's because of an increasingly alarming trend of trying
to turn science fiction into "acceptable literature". I know, I
know, we want our SF to be well written, and have good
characterization, plot, and action. But most of all, reading SF
should be fun. We all got into this genre because of the stuff
that we read as kids--you know, the stuff where the future was
bright, and while the worlds the authors were exploring may have
had their problems, the stories we were told made us believe that
we should be optimistic for the future. An increasingly large
number of Hugo-nominated novels these days attempt to be literary.
Form, style, and structure are taking the place of a well-told
story that contains characters that we care about, a plot that
makes sense (why doesn't Thailand just release the contents of the
seed bank out into the public so that maybe real food can be grown
again, and why did we have those cheshires at all, anyway?), and is
*fun to read*.

THE WINDUP GIRL may be a well-written story, but it is boring,
depressing, and a chore to read. I don't want a novel to club me
over the head with ecological, genetic, and bioterrorism themes. I
don't want to be preached to about "important issues" (the inside
front flap talks about the novel addressing "important issues").
My leisure reading is for fun, and this wasn't it.

The problem is that the same 400-500 people that nominate for the
Hugos every year are trying to turn the genre into literature (and
of course the charge is led by Locus and other magazines), but
that's not what the majority of SF readers want. I'm sure it's not
what I want.

THE WINDUP GIRL is a pretty good novel--it just isn't good science
fiction. [-jak]

CAPSULE: THE MINI is an amiable if not always funny comedy made by
a crew of new-comers behind and in front of the camera. There
approach is scattershot gags with weird characters, film allusions,
and funny incidents like an accidental bank robbery. The film
takes some patience, but the comic style does eventually kick in.
Vulgarity is kept to a minimum and intentionally sexual humor never
rears its head. It will be interesting to see writer/director Ron
Beck's next film. Rating: high 0 (-4 to +4) or 5/10

The cliché in the old Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland films was that
a bunch of inexperienced people get together and say, "Hey, let's
put on a show!" The show, of course, comes out as well as MGM
studios could make it. So what happens when a bunch of newcomers
really do put on a show? That was more or less a case with the
cast and crew of THE MINI, a 2007 comedy written and directed by
first-timer Ron Beck and a crew of other first-timers who get
together and make a film. They have a lot of their act together,
but it takes some time for THE MINI to get its comic rhythm going.
Watching the film I asked myself several times why it wasn't going
over better than it was. There were several gags that should have
been funny, but there was something missing in the timing.
Eventually I found myself going with the action. Not every gag is
funny, but then the same could be said of the film AIRPLANE!
Making a few allowances this is a very good-natured little comedy.

THE MINI has a somewhat familiar story line. We have the likable
loser who can become a winner if he wins the big game (in this case
a mini-marathon race). The 30-something failure has found himself
in a dead end job selling futons in a mall bedding store.
Everybody knows that where the action is is selling... mattresses.
Everybody knows that where the action is is selling... MATTRESSES.
(Still no laughs?) Well, that is what is going on with the humor.
You can tell where the jokes are, but somehow the delivery does not
always work the first time through. Eventually humor does start
kicking in with enough jokes that they can spare the ones that
don't work.

Fran Molon (played by Larry Dahlke) is our futon salesman who wants
to move up to selling mattresses. The guy selling mattresses
currently is Rick (Chris Stack), a creep who is clearly the
favorite of the manager Stan (Darrell Francis), an even bigger
creep. Rick and Stan constantly belittle Fran, and in a moment of
levity Stan claims that if Fran can win the mall's mini-marathon
race, Fran can sell mattresses. Fran is the kind of guy who has
never won anything, but he decides to try for the big race. A lot
of the film is following the loser through life as other people
take advantage of him while he prepares for the big race. Fran
bounces off of his buddy Dale (Jeff Stockberger) and his new cute
girlfriend Carmen (Angie Craft). There is some chemistry in the
comic relationship between Fran and Dale.

There are mock-tragic stories of Fran's and Dale's youth; there is
a frustrating run-in with an auto-repair shop; there is a sequence
borrowed from a certain martial arts film; there are bizarre
characters; there is some dating awkwardness. Whatever seemed like
it might work got thrown into the stew pot.

This is a low-budget film--reportedly it cost only $25,000--made to
show off the comic ability of a small group of actors. It shows
promise, but it feels like it aimed for AIRPLANE! and instead gave
us a weak NAPOLEAN DYNAMITE. I rate it a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale
or 5/10. I expect that Beck will do more films and they will be
more on-target.

And in response to Evelyn's comments on "April March" in the same
issue, Peter writes, "With respect to alternate pasts, Leo
Frankowski alluded to that effect in his 'Cross Time Engineer'
novels. His protagonist apparently created ripples changing
history backwards as well as forwards. But the concept was not
explored to any great extent." [-pr]

Clive Cussler has been writing novels about saving the world from
oceanic disasters for years, so I have grown conditioned to the
idea they require a spectacular cause (like massive injections of
toxic waste beneath the Sahara)--when merely breaking a necessary
pipe in an oil rig can have consequences on the same scale. [-mg]

Mark replies, "I was unaware of the Cussler novels being on the
same sort of subject matter. I wonder if he has considered a
scenario like we have." [-mrl]

THE CIRCUS OF DR. LAO by Charles Finney (ISBN-13 978-0-8032-6907-1)
was the book chosen for the Middletown book-and-film group this
month, and I ended up with a bunch of brief comments:

[Warning, the following comments contain some spoilers. It is
like revealing the jokes in a comedy ahead of time. And THE CIRCUS
OF DR. LAO is a book you do not want spoiled. It is one of my
favorite fantasy books. -mrl]

The circus comes to Abalone, Arizona. The abalone is an ocean
creature, not one of the desert, and it seems unlikely that someone
would name a town in Arizona after them.

The proofreader is Mr. Etaoin; E, T, A, O, I, and N are the most
common letters in English, in order.

The college boys are members of Sigma Omicron Beta--in other words,
they are S.O.B.s.

The soldier is traveling by train in "sidedoor pullmans", i.e.,
freight cars.

One good touch is that the unicorn explicitly does *not* have a
horse's tail. All too often, artists depict unicorns as being just
horses with a horn stuck on them.

Slick calls his friend Paul "Oom Powl", which is Dutch for "Uncle
Paul", which in turn is a play on the idea of a Dutch uncle--though
admittedly Paul does not play that role.

The question of whether it is a Russian or a bear is carried on far
too long.

Most of the fantastic creatures in THE CIRCUS OF DR. LAO are drawn
from actual mythology, legend, or literature, but the Hound of the
Hedges appears to be entirely Finney's creation. (One is reminded
of Jorge Luis Borges's UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INFAMY, in which the
stories are generally based on fact, but with a tweak here and a
twist there.)

Of the satyr, Dr. Lao says, "They provoked him to jealousy with
strange gods, with abominations provoked they him to anger." The
phrase "to become strange gods" is from Deuteronomy 32:16, and
"strange gods" retains that allusion.

Finney likes to use alliteration: "Then the midway was desolate,
save for its wreath of dust, as the people all disappeared beneath
the canvas. And the ringing of the bronze gong diminuendoed and
died."

At times, though, Finney gets so involved in his literary
references that he forgets his characters' natures. For example, I
doubt that one of the quarantine inspectors would really know who
Pierrot and Columbine were.

Lao's switching back and forth between pidgin English and full
(even florid) English reminds me of the story of the man sitting
next to a Chinese (or perhaps Japanese) gentleman at a fancy dinner
many years ago. Wanting to make conversation, the man asked,
"Likee dinner?" The Chinese gentleman just smiled. After the
meal, the host announced the speaker, and the Chinese gentleman got
up and gave a speech in perfect English. He then returned to his
seat, turned to the man, and asked, "Likee speech?" (A similar
incident is portrayed in the film THE WIND AND THE LION.)

The book THE CIRCUS OF DR. LAO is *much* better than the movie
(7 FACES OF DR. LAO).

In his review of CRO-MAGNON: HOW THE ICE AGE GAVE BIRTH TO THE
FIRST MODERN HUMANS by Brian Fagan (ISBN-13 978-1-596-915824), A.
C. Grayling writes, "An equally significant discovery, made this
year by Svante Paabo's team at the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, is that between one and four
per cent of modern human DNA is Neanderthal. Modern Africans share
no DNA with Neanderthals." There is a great irony here, I think,
that the people most associated with the fear of "miscegenation"
(the mixing of what we currently term races) are themselves the
descendents of the results of the mixing of two groups even more
distant from each other than races (though not so far distant as
separate species). If one applied the "one-drop" rule to those
segregationists of the Jim Crow era, they might not even qualify
for citizenship. And one wonders where a Neanderthal/Cro-Magnon
mix might fall in the Aryan "racial purity" laws.

THE POWER OF BABEL: A NATURAL HISTORY OF LANGUAGE by John
H. McWhorter (ISBN-13 978-0-7167-4473-3), written in 2001, could be
considered the companion book to his Teaching Company course, "The
Story of Human Language." I started reading it, but found that it
duplicated the course almost completely. Ironically, when
McWhorter talks about how change is inevitable, he says, "It has
gotten to the point that saying I don't have a 'cell' lends me, I
suspect, the air of a sequestered holdout that we sense in people
who do not have VCRs." Now, only a few years later, *lots* of
people do not have VCRs--they have become "old technology".

It you don't have access to the Teaching Company, I recommend this
book, but the course is much better. For one thing, when McWhorter
is talking about how words change, vowels shift, and consonants
drift, *hearing* the comparisons is so much more meaningful than
just seeing them written phonetically. [-ecl]

Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Quote of the Week:
Ignoramus, n. A person unacquainted with certain
kinds of knowledge familiar to yourself, and having
certain other kinds that you know nothing about.
-- Ambrose Bierce, 1890